Will 5G be necessary for self-driving cars?
Proponents of 5G say it will offer ultra-fast connections, speedier data downloads, and be able to handle millions more connections than 4G mobile networks can cope with today. One use for 5G is self-driving cars, but will they really need it? The telecoms industry envisions autonomous cars equipped with hundreds of sensors collecting and receiving information all at once over a network. It calls this concept "Vehicle-to-everything" (V2X). To achieve this, the car needs to detect blind spots and avoid collisions with people, animals or other vehicles on the road. As the car drives, its sensors will pick up information about: weather and road conditions accidents obstacles and objects moving near the car Once the information is gathered, either an on-board computer will make an instant decision, or the data could be sent into the cloud to be processed, and then a decision would be sent back to the vehicle. Smarter than humans Imagine a scenario wh...